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William Holtz
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William Holtz
1
A brief summary will remind most readers of Frank's essential
points; those who here encounter the concept of "spatial form" for the
first time may want to refer to the original essay in which copious illustrations make clear the ideas that underlie the following discussion.
Essentially, Frank's argument is an extension of a concept fundamental
to general aesthetics that received its classical treatment in Lessing's Laoco6n. Lessing, disturbed by a tendency of poetry to become too descriptive and painting too narrational, sought to rectify centuries of uncritical
acceptance of the Horatian ut pictura poesis by insisting on the absolute
distinction between time and space-and, consequently, between literature, which consists of verbal symbols (language) occupying a sequence
of time, and painting, or visual art generally, which consists of visual
symbols occupying an area of space. From this distinction Lessing concludes that the legitimate province of literature is narrative-things in
action-while the legitimate province of painting is the visual form-an
arrangement of contemporaneous figures in a moment of rest. Frank
acknowledges Lessing as his model and draws upon the temporal-spatial
distinction to describe a quality of modern literature that he terms "spatial form." Spatial form is not, as we might guess, necessarily "descriptive" writing aimed at the mind's eye but rather a form that grows out of
the writer's attempt to negate the temporal principle inherent in lanYork, 1948); Critiquesand Essays in Criticism:1920-1948, ed. R. W. Stallman (New York,
1949). In Frank's The Widening Gyre (New Brunswick, N. J., 1963).
3. Gregory T. Polletta, ed.,Issues in Contemporary
LiteraryCriticism(Boston, 1973), p. 24.
William Holtz, professor of English at the University of MissouriColumbia, is currently preparing an edition of an unpublished juvenile
manuscript by Charlotte Brontie.
Critical Inquiry
Winter 1977
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William Holtz
Zeitgeist can be read in the change of style. The connection with literary
form is made by way of the relationship between temporal values and
three-dimensional perspective: although all visual art is inherently spatial, three-dimensional art is less spatial than abstract, two-dimensional
art, for "depth ... gives objects a time-value because it places them in the
real world in which events occur." Thus modern art moves toward a
purer spatiality, and the abolishment of representational threedimensional perspective has its "exact complement" in the timetranscending devices by which modern literature achieves its own "spatial form."5
The academic response to Frank's essay is best represented by Professor G. Giovannini, whose essentially deprecatory essay is based on a
clear-sighted analysis of the problems of comparisons between the arts.
One of his basic contentions is that the "common element" upon which
such comparisons rest proves generally to be "an element actually given
(i.e., perceptible to sense) in one object and objectively analyzable in it,
and not given in the other but merely suggested in the affective response
and applicable to the object only by way of metaphor."6 Frank, it may be
said, has allowed himself to be misled by the pictorial metaphor which,
although useful in a limited way for suggesting the concept he struggles
with, introduces irrelevancies when used as an analogy to argue from
painting to literature. For the "spatiality" he finds in literary form is not
the spatiality objectively present in a painting or a sculpture (except for
"shaped" poems and other such typographical devices); rather, this literary spatiality seems to be an operation of the mind synthesizing data
which may (in some instances Frank cites) form a visualizable image with
communicable spatial dimension but which (in most of his examples) do
not necessarily cohere in any demonstrably spatial way. Moreover,
Frank's argument neglects the unavoidable problem of temporal order
in data so synthesized: this order is objectively a feature of the work, and
must be dealt with, whether the data come in a "normal" sequence or no.
Thus the spatial order of a painting and the "spatiality" of The Waste
Land are of different ontological orders, and the critic should not confuse them.
Such an analysis considerably diminishes the authority of Frank's
argument. But it remains to be determined what is salvageable; despite
manifest inadequacies, the theory does seem to touch something significant in modern literature, and if the pictorial analogy is misleading in
certain of its metaphorical extensions, there is yet an area of important
5. Ibid., pp. 56-57.
6. "Method in the Study of Literature in Its Relation to the Other Fine Arts,"Journal
of Aestheticsand Art Criticism8 (March 1950): 185-95, quote from p. 190. See also Walter
Sutton, "The Literary Image and the Reader: A Consideration of the Theory of Spatial
Form,"Journal of Aestheticsand Art Criticism 16 (1957): 112-23; Jan Miel, "Temporal Form
in the Novel," Modern Language Notes 84 (December 1969): 916-30.
Critical Inquiry
Winter 1977
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relevance. For metaphor has heuristic value, giving a local body and a
name to conceptions not yet established in the communal mental economy nor, at times, nameable in any other way in the mind of the
individual. Frank's critics may have in fact identified merely what he has
not said without perceiving what real import his figure carries. We are
here concerned, it would seem, with the essential nature of our literary
perceptions, with the phenomenology, some might say, of literature.
Frank and his critics with equal honesty attempt to define their perceptions, and my own concern stems from my initial .impression that both
are equally right. What follows is my attempt to establish a ground within
which both may legitimately be right.
2
One measure of the validity of Frank's insight is the extent to which
other versions of his ideas appear in other contexts: for if "spatial form"
refers to something real, it cannot have escaped notice by other readers.
One thinks, for example, of Northrop Frye's description of the critic
viewing all the elements of the poem as a simultaneous array before him;
or of Gaston Bachelard's evocative descriptions of The Poetics of Space. Or
Pound's interest in ideographic script; or the frequent critical association
of modern literature with impressionist painting. Or Eliot's poet synthesizing Spinoza, the sound of the typewriter, and the smell of cookery into
a unified whole. Or-at the root of it all, perhaps-Poe's insistence on
the unified effect of the story or poem.' All of these instances reflect a
more or less casual assumption of the basic premise of Frank's essay.
More recently another critic, Frank Kermode, has offered an alternative
description of this general problem. In The RomanticImage8 he assesses
symbolist poetic theory; here the verbal image (or symbol), autonomous
and autotelic, presumably unites meaning and feeling without intervening reflection or discourse: the "image" so hypostatized seems very close
to a "spatial" form, and certainly the suppression of discourse, of reflection generally, follows from the disruption of syntax and narrative that
results from the impulse toward "spatial" effects. Provisionally, we might
say that Joseph Frank's essay is grounded in an essentially formalist
conception of the literary work as artifact, and that the striking features
7. Northrop Frye, "Literary Criticism," in TheAimsand Methodsof Scholarshipin Modern
Languages and Literature, ed. James Thorpe (New York, 1963), p. 65. See also Fables of
Identity:Studies in Poetic Mythology(New York, 1963), p. 21. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of
Space, trans. Maria Jolas (New York, 1964). Ernest Fenollosa, The ChineseWrittenCharacter
as a Mediumfor Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound (San Francisco, 1969). T. S. Eliot, "The Metaphysical
Poets," SelectedEssays (New York, 1950), p. 247. Edgar Allan Poe, review of Twice-Told
Tales, in Works, 17 vols., ed. James A. Harrison (New York, 1902), 11: 104-13.
8. Frank Kermode, The RomanticImage (London, 1957).
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contained field of the poem-in-itself, often under the metaphor of artifact (the wrought urn or jeweled bird), while the emerging structuralist
criticism tends to efface the individuality of the artifact for the sake of
clarifying the larger field of which it is a part.13 In either case, synchronicity is a condition of knowledge, and the spatial metaphor Frank
applies to the first is equally applicable to the second; and each can be
read as symptomatic of a modern discontent with (1) the substantialist
implications of metaphors of organism or artifact, (2) the temporal dimension of meaning as manifest in syntax, rhetoric, or narrative (these
implicitly identified with philosophy and science), and (3) the temporal
sequences of history and evolution as connections between individual
works. This impulse toward relational concepts may in fact be the intellectual version of the abstractionist tendencies Frank connects with the
general malaise of our culture; or, as another writer has put it, a world in
which the natural order has been largely supplanted by a vast network of
communication systems may very well be thought of in terms of the
structure of language itself.14
3
If we take seriously the hypothesis that knowledge resides in complementary modes, then, in the broadest sense, both Frank and his critics
are correct. Considerable advantage accrues from this point of view. We
can say, for example, that both Ulysses and Great Expectations have a
"spatial" dimension as we contemplate their achieved orders. But if we
imagine GreatExpectationsin the narrative manner of Ulysses,it becomes
apparent that however the "story" might remain the same, the temporal
component of our total experience would be radically different. And
although we can say that Joyce's technique is to the end of enforcing one
mode of perception over another (this constituting, in part, its modernity),15 the technique does not obliterate the temporal sequence but
rather moves along unfamiliar tracks. This is to pose again Frank Kermode's commonsense observation: that our continuing discourse about
modern literature apparently depends upon temporal connections
within the works other than the narrative, rhetorical, and syntactical
sequences that have been abandoned.16 What these poetic sinews are
remains to be accounted for, but to the extent that they apparently
depend heavily upon covert contributions by the reader to the continuity
13. The point is made clearly by Polletta, pp. 18-19. His survey of criticism contains a
good bibliography on structuralism: see n. 30, pp. 175-76.
14. Jameson, p. ix.
15. This emphasis is perhaps best understood in terms of the concept of "defamiliarization" suggested by the Russian Formalists. See Jameson, pp. 54-59.
16. Kermode, p. 155.
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Such, finally, are the implications for literary theory and criticism of
Joseph Frank's concept of spatial form, a concept that initially defines
itself in terms of an opposition between Lessing's theory of literary form
and the theory implicit in the forms of modern literature. Beneath the
contrast in formal assumptions presumably lies a cultural contrast and,
deeper still, a contrast between classical and modern physics and
metaphysics, as the substantial certainties of Newton's world gave way to
the relativity of Einstein's. What I have tried to suggest here is not so
much a solution to paradoxes such as those Frank's essay turns on as a
model for thinking about them. Implicit in this model is a vision of the
world (or of human experience in the world) as a pervasive dialectic
between synchronic and diachronic conceptions in which "space,"
"field," and "particle" serve as convenient metaphors in our discourse
about one pole of this dialectic. Indeed, the difficult reach for metaphor,
the simple fact that the word synchronicmerely identifies a modality of
17. Abraham Moles, Information Theory and Esthetic Perception, trans. Joel E. Cohn
(Urbana, Ill., 1966), pp. 57-58, 94-95.
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Winter 1977
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time, suggests that this pole is somehow less real than time itself, which
we may identify as the necessary condition of our participation in the
natural order; whereas that which we call space is of a different order,
emerging as "other" as consciousness separates itself from the flux of
time and constructs its symbolic orders in language, art, and science.
To this extent, "picture" may necessarily always occupy a privileged
relationship to language as it manifests the timelessness that culture
strives for in its contention with the perpetual novelty of mere chronicity. To say this is not to reduce literature to description but merely to
recognize description as a highly formalized version of this relationship.
Lessing's contention in the eighteenth century was with certain abuses of
this formal relationship deriving ultimately from both the conquest of
the European imagination by the glories of Renaissance and baroque
painting and the academic codification of casual remarks from classical
antiquity that did in fact recognize a basic complementarity.18 Lessing's
account itself, despite its clear-cut theoretical distinction between the arts,
teeters on the edge of paradox: the vaunted example of the shield of
Achilles can be said to reduce his distinction to one between still and
moving pictures,'9 while a later consideration of the problem renders
the whole matter very problematical, as he is unable to exorcise a residual pictorialism at the heart of his conception of language:
Poetry must try to raise its arbitrary signs to natural signs: that is
how it differs from prose and becomes poetry. The means by which
this is accomplished are the tone of words, the position of words,
measure, figures and tropes, similes, etc. All these make arbitrary
signs more like natural signs, but they don't actually change them
into natural signs; consequently all genres that use only these means
must be looked on as lower kinds of poetry; and the highest kind of
poetry will be that which transforms the arbitrary signs completely
into natural signs. That is dramatic poetry .. .20
Here we might say that Lessing reaches the limit of his verbaltemporal theory at just about the point where Joseph Frank begins his
pictorial-spatial one-that is, at the point of the verbal image. And
although a bias toward the drama, with its inherent temporal spectacle,
saves Lessing's theory, there remain other genres in which the described
effect can only be a subjective image, projected upon the mind's eye with
all the illusionary effect of painting itself. Joseph Frank, we might guess,
beginning with a commitment to modern literature, found in Pound's
doctrine of the poetic image a key to its essential nature and in Lessing's
18. Not only Horace's misconstrued ut pictura poesis but also Simonides' "painting is
mute poetry, and poetry a speaking picture." See also Wimsatt and Brooks, pp. 271-75.
19. Wimsatt and Brooks, pp. 269-70.
20. Cited from Rene Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, 1750-1950, 4 vols. (New
Haven, 1955), 1: 164-65.
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